Writing the career script

: The partnership promotion process in law firms

Abstract

This thesis answers the question of “How is the career script written?” It is framed within the social constructionist paradigm and conceives of careers as evolving and unfolding over time, as individual actors navigate their careers at the intersection of their sense of self and the contexts they are part of. It aims to capture these dynamics drawing on the notion of the career script and investigates the processes that underlie its writing. The empirical setting for this research is UK law firms, more specifically the period to partner promotion. A qualitative approach to data collection was taken and various qualitative methods were made use of, including the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), focused interviews and participant drawings. Recognising the importance of individual experience and meaning making, this thesis draws on the interpretivist tradition and places an analytical emphasis on understanding these experiences and meanings. The findings suggest that individuals write their career script by drawing on a repertoire of collective and individual interpretative resources. They further engage in four tasks that underlie the writing process, including 1) the exploration of promotional selves, which involves the interplay of selecting, discarding and justifying of resource repertoires, 2) the deliberation about possibilities, which describes the shift from
internal processes of self-exploration to identifying a socially legitimate promotional mandate, 3) the enactment of choices, by either engaging in strategies of differentiation or fitting in, and 4) the opening up of parallel spaces, which provides individuals with the space to cope with the challenges of the writing process. Finally, this thesis introduces the concept of the promotional mode, and conceptualises it as the central character, which is constructed by participants through, and as a result of the writing process. The thesis contributes to three main literatures. First, it contributes to previous studies on career scripts by proposing an approach that perceives of career scripts as being written and by uncovering the dynamics that underlie this writing process. Second, it contributes to literature on career agency by developing our understanding of the embedded construction of career agency and offering a reconceptualization of the concept. Third, it adds to the literature on artefacts more broadly, and career artefacts specifically, by developing their role as mediators between individual and multiple contexts. Finally, it makes methodological contributions to the analysis of visual methods.

Date of Award	1 Jan 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Nicholas Kinnie (Supervisor) & Juani Swart (Supervisor)